The day is finally here, the day that the GNOME team releases GNOME 3.0, the first major revision of the GNOME project since 2002. Little of GNOME 2.x is left in GNOME 3.0, and as such, you could call it GNOME's KDE4. We're living in fortunate times, what, with two wildly divergent open source desktops.

This is/was my gut reaction as well... reflecting further, however, I think the designers might have done this intentionally. The overall shell design seems to lend itself very well towards tablet and touch-based hardware. I wonder if that (sort of "future thinking") drove this layout. [Though, they probably shouldn't bet the farm on one style. I would have preferred UI elements that adapt to the system being used---standard desktop, Tablet, portable, phone, etc.]

Actually, what you just described is pretty much exactly what plasma-netbook (the "small screen" desktop shell for KDE4).

Personally, and I haven't played with GNOME Shell much yet, plasma-netbook got things "more" right. Although, you do have to remove the default "launcher" bar and put back the default panel, taskbar, and systray to really make it useful.

I'm definitely looking forward to see how user feedback, dev enhancements, and new infrastructural implementations land in future releases. I can't wait for 3.1, 3.2, and so on!

Anyone tried GNOME 3.0 via an NFS-mounted / and /home? Does it work better than KDE4? Better/worse than KDE3? Better/worse than GNOME 2.x?